Michael Dervanreviews Opera 2005, Mozart - Don Giovanni, at the Cork Opera House

Opera 2005

Cork Opera House

Mozart - Don Giovanni

Director Bryan Flynn and designer Lisa Zagone have transferred the setting of Opera 2005's new Don Giovanni from Spain to a film-noirish Hollywood. The Commendatore becomes the proprietor of a joint called Don Pedro's. The fateful dinner invitation of Act II takes place in a morgue, where the inscription about vengeance is read from a toe-tag. There's a lot of use of shadow-miming, with the offstage pictures sometimes filling in the plot, sometimes elaborating some inner emotional turmoil.

The orchestral sounds from the pit under Kevin Mallon are from an entirely different world. The instruments are modern, but the expressive world, the textures and the balances, are driven by the concerns of period performance practice. The sound is light, clean, transparent, qualities which remain largely unaffected by moments of untidiness and uncertainty.

The singing is different again. Concerns of 18th-century musical style hardly register. The opera is sung in Amanda Holden's streetwise English translation. This encourages plenty of the word-driven style a lot of singers adopt for comedy.

The strangeness of the evening lies in the fact that Kevin Mallon, as Opera 2005's artistic director, pays so little detailed attention to the intentions of the cast he has chosen, and that the cast, in turn, seems so often indifferent to the musical discipline his handling of the orchestra is most concerned with.

The best moments of what you might call blended music-making come from the Donna Anna of Majella Cullagh. There's nobility and emotional depth in her characterisation of the woman whose assault at the hands of the Don leads to her father's death. She offers the evening's most beautiful and most touching singing. The raw and emotionally unmodulated Donna Elvira of Sandra Oman and the at times almost matronly Zerlina of Sylvia O'Brien seem like serious miscastings. The Don of Riccardo Simonetti and the Leporello of Martin Higgins get through their business with stagewise efficiency. The heavily accented English of Panos Tsikos adds a level of pathos to the undermining suffered by his Masetto. The Don Ottavio of Nils Brown provides a plausible reserve for the distraught Donna Anna, and the final interventions of Deryck Hamon's Commendatore are theatrically effective in spite of the strained delivery.

I heard the evening from the back row of the upper circle of the Cork Opera House. It's as uncomfortable a spot as any other I've encountered here, and the air gets hot and stale quickly. But the top of the house is also the musical equivalent of a sun trap. The sound is full and clear, and there's a balance between stage and pit I've never heard from other seats in this house.

Until Monday